How can the Boston Celtics bounce back from the season’s most devastating loss with only one day to recuperate, knowing the Miami Heat just overcame the best game of Rajon Rondo’s career to seize a commanding 2-0 lead in the Eastern Conference finals?

The hope is that professional athletes, especially ones who have succeeded for as many years as Boston’s core, don’t recognize the demoralizing nature of close losses.

The hope is that the Celtics don’t see Game 2 as a statement on the futility of their best efforts, but rather a contest they were one or two plays away from winning.

“Our guys are very confident heading into Game 3,” coach Doc Rivers said Thursday.

Really?

The Celtics received 44 points, 10 assists and eight rebounds from Rondo Wednesday, a postseason performance unlike any in NBA history – and they lost.

Heat guard Dwyane Wade was scoreless for the first 23 minutes, yet the Celtics fell.

Wade and LeBron James missed several free throws and decent looks down the stretch of both regulation and overtime, and still the Celtics return to TD Garden for Friday’s Game 3 down 0-2.

But if Boston can find consolation from such a back-breaking defeat, it’s this: even when Rondo inevitably returns to earth after flirting with the stars throughout Game 2, the Celtics can improve in other areas.

Kevin Garnett was far from dominant Wednesday night, hitting on just 6 of his 18 field-goal attempts while settling for a pedestrian 18 points and eight rebounds. The Celtics need to involve him more in the offense and he needs to do a better job of staying aggressive throughout.

The Celtics received just seven points, five rebounds and one assist from their bench. While Mickael Pietrus, Greg Stiemsma and Keyon Dooling won’t evolve into MVP candidates by Friday night, they can certainly all contribute more than they did Wednesday.

The Celtics found a way to limit the penetration of Wade and James, at least more so than they did in Game 1, and were just one or two plays from achieving road victory despite Miami role players Mario Chalmers and Udonis Haslem posting their best outings of the postseason.

That’s the bright side, of course. The dark side of Boston’s loss is that the Celtics wasted a night when they held their own on the glass, Ray Allen looked relatively healthy and Rondo hovered in the stratosphere, somewhere between the clouds and heaven.

Still, the Celtics swear they aren’t discouraged.

“We don’t have no surrender or retreat in us,” Dooling told reporters after Game 2. “You know we’re a grind-it-out team. We’re going to continue to come back. We’re going to fight. We’re going to claw. We’re going to scratch. We’re going to do whatever we got to do and try and win basketball games.”

It might be difficult for us to imagine a team maintaining high morale after such a crushing loss. Then again, there are dozens of reasons we never became professional athletes.